


here is the church and here is the steeple

by stilitana



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Hal will be here.......later, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, Recovery, Temporary Amnesia, post war child
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-11 11:35:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19108852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: Adam and Yvonne's home for wayward vampires obtains a new resident.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello dear reader, I hope you're doing well. I wrote this a very long time ago, about two years now, and since I started feeling nostalgic about Being Human I decided to clean it up and post it. I apologize for any mistakes or failures to make this sound as though it's taking place in the UK, since I have never lived there.
> 
> I hope that you enjoy it. You can find me on tumblr @stilitana. As always, thank you for reading.

I

There is a taste and a sound curled under his tongue and it dissolves as he wakes; he clings, licks behind his teeth trying to get at the memory as though it’s a bit of food stuck in his gums. There’s smoke and heat and some sharp, balmy flavor that leaves him unsettled but wanting — what? Want, there is want curled like a fist in the pit of his stomach and it has no name for its desire, just presses insistently at his skin demanding to be satisfied, quenched, and how? There are paisley curtains across from the bed. He is on a bed. Some muscle-memory makes him roll onto his side with half-lidded eyes and reach out his arm but the other side is cold; there is scarcely room for another person at all and his hand hangs over the edge of the bed, his fingers brush empty air, and was this what he was looking for?

There is something he’s meant to be doing. His hand clenches reflexively as he tries to remember, fingers curling to grip something that is not there, something that has no name but feels like desperate intent. Desperation, there, that’s something leftover from the dream he’d been having and now its aftertaste sours in his mouth and mind and leaves him breathless, like a runaway train car hurtling down a cliff only to find itself in a bed of feathers with no idea what to do now that the velocity of its imminent destruction is gone. How to move without the momentum of falling.

“Good morning, dear.”

He turns around and there is an older woman with grey hair cropped close to her head sitting in an armchair before the window. There is light coming through the window; he flinches away from it before he can wonder why, tucking himself away from the triangle of sun that falls on the bed and curling into the shadows. The woman stares at him with a neutral sort of kindness. She has a quiet dignity about her. Her eyes are only a little sad. Her voice is firm and she is broad-shouldered and matronly and he wants to trust her. He feels relief at the sight of her. She looks like the sort of person who will give him a quick, rational explanation with no riddles or fuss. He doesn’t have time for that. He never has time. She is wearing cream-colored gloves.

“My name is Yvonne Bradshaw. How are you feeling?”

“A bit odd,” Nick says, wincing at the sound of his voice. There’s some kind of punishment for the tremulous, simpering note creeping into it. Nothing happens. Nothing keeps happening. He feels old. He wonders just how long he’s been asleep. Not long enough to explain away the feeling that he’s overstayed his welcome.

“What is the last thing you remember?” Yvonne asked.

Nick thinks he should be panicking but instead it all just exhausts him. God, not all this again, he thinks, and doesn’t know why. “I don’t know. I was working, I think. Someone asked for me.”

“Right, yes, good,” Yvonne says, cutting in, shuffling some papers on her lap and glancing down at them. Nick tries to peer at them but can’t make out the words.

“Where am I?”

“My home. You’ve been in an accident, but you’re safe now.”

“What sort of accident?”

“You hurt your head quite badly, I’m afraid. If you’re experiencing any confusion, any memory loss or strange thoughts, that is why.”

“How? Was there—it was a fire? She was so careful, she wouldn’t have left the oven on,” Nick said, trailing off into a mutter.

“You suffered some burns, yes. But you’re doing much better now. My partner and I will take care of you.”

“Shouldn’t I be in a hospital? I don’t see burns,” he said, looking at his arms. There were some reddish patches of irritation, but nothing that resembled burns.

“You’ve been discharged. Don’t worry, we’re perfectly qualified or else you would not have been entrusted to our care. We are in fact perhaps the most qualified people you’ll find for the task.”

“I’ve got a wife?” Nick said, unsure why it was a question. “My wife, she—where is she? What’s happened to her? To Rachel?”

Yvonne shifted through her papers again as though referring to notes. She struggled to maintain her calm, composed demeanour. Her voice shook a bit as she said, “Your wife was in the accident, too. I’m afraid that she didn’t make it. I’m very sorry, Mr. Cutler.”

“Oh,” Nick said, looking at his left hand. His ring was missing. There wasn’t even a band of pinker skin to mark its absence as there usually was when he slipped it off. This was all wrong—on second thought, he couldn’t remember wearing a ring at all. Once, maybe, a long time ago...but it couldn’t possibly have been so long ago as it felt. 

Somehow he felt he’d done this all before. Why wasn’t he upset? He felt numb. As though someone had opened his chest and scooped out all the fine and sensitive parts he used to feel anything other than want. He lay down on his back.

“Mr. Cutler? I understand this must be quite a shock, but my partner and I are committed to helping you through this. If there’s anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask. It’s also important that you...that you share with us any strange symptoms you might experience, no matter how silly or—or unsettling they may seem. For safety reasons, you understand, just to be safe. You’re doing very well but we want to avoid any complications.”

“All right,” Cutler said. His stomach growled. “Who was that man?”

“Pardon me?”

“The man who asked for me. The gambler.”

“No one important, Mr. Cutler. Just try and forget him. Just your mind making a minor memory more significant than it really was.”

“Ok. What now?”

“Now you just rest,” she said, rising and patting his arm. “Just rest. Are you hungry?” she asked, her voice getting a little high and funny on the question. He nodded. “Good, good. Adam and I have gotten started on breakfast. You rest here and I’ll come and let you know when it’s ready, ok?”

He nodded and she left, closing the door quietly behind her.

He sat up and felt dizzy. He took a moment to close his eyes and when he opened them he was surprised to find it all still there, the cozy little room with its wallpaper and muted colors. He was wearing a soft undershirt, cotton trousers. Dissonance built in his mind like storm clouds, blocking everything else out, leaving no room for purposeful, coherent thought. He was muddled, full of fog and conflicting impulses that had no origin. 

He scratched idly at his arms, at the irritated patches of skin. He was itchy. Was that what healed burns felt like? He didn’t feel any burns. He lifted one hesitant hand to his face. He was seized by trepidation, morbid curiosity. He realized he wasn’t quite sure what he looked like. He felt his skin and was shocked by how smooth it was. He found that for some reason he’d expected wrinkles.

Still, he must have been in an accident. His head was a mess. There was this hole inside him. Something was missing. He went to the door and peered down the stairs. He could hear a strange thumping sound. He was so hungry. He’d been in the middle of something important, if he could only remember. He’d been dreaming wicked dreams but now the sun was up and evaporating all the dew and the dreams were steam and it all got away from him. He was hungry.

 

II

 

He realized they were a couple almost straight away. They weren’t exactly hiding it, what with the lingering glances, their hands resting together on the table. Oh, who was he kidding — the boy, Adam’s, lewd comments were more than enough.

Nick felt trifurcated. There was an upright, almost old-fashioned part of him that felt a pious sort of indignation; no personal disgust, but affronted nonetheless at this infringement on the way things are done. Another part of him leered, didn’t care a lick about their love affair except for how it was ripe with ways to gain an upperhand. A third part of him felt a misplaced pang of sympathy. Where that came from he wasn’t sure. And beneath the sympathy, right there, was that a bit of envy? How had they made it, how could they have simple happiness in such a monstrous arrangement?

( _ That’s not the half of it, _ some voice piped up in his mind.)

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Adam stopped shoveling eggs into his mouth and Yvonne set down her cup of tea to ask, “What was that?”

Nick cleared his throat. “Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

Adam nodded, leaned forward conspiratorially. “You hit your head pretty damn hard. Reckon you shook some screws loose. Hearing voices?”

“Just my own,” Nick said, and flushed. “I mean, no. Thinking out loud, that’s all. Lovely home you have. Lovely tea,” he says, raising his glass and taking a sip. His hands shook. 

“Right,” said Adam, sitting back with a face that said, Who are you kidding? He’d seen Nick come down the stairs and freeze in front of the TV. Adam was watching the news. Nick didn’t look at him, just stared at the screen.

“What on earth is that?” he’d murmured. And then he replied to himself, he said, “A television, you daft prick.” His own face heated up. “I know what a television is, and it’s not like that.”

“Having fun?” Adam asked, watching Nick’s little one-man conversation play out.

Nick whirled and tried to smile. He felt queasy. “You must be Yvonne’s...partner?”

“You got that right. Let’s get this out of the way right now: Yvonne’s off limits, capiche? You don’t give her any trouble and you and I’ll get along fine.”

“Er. Alright,” Nick said, managing to stifle a laugh.

_ What’s so funny? _

Adam looked him up and down. “Thought you’d be more freaked out. Mind, I’m not complaining. I wasn’t looking forward to all that. It gets tiring.”

_ I agree. I’ve done it all before. _ “I don’t feel burned.”

“Oh, trust me, mate, you got burned all right,” said Adam. “Real bad. Face not even a mother could love kind’ve burned. Modern medicine, fantastic, am I right?”

It was a test. The boy was pushing him towards something that felt a lot like a cliff.

Nick stepped back. “Yes,” he muttered. “Fantastic.”

There was something he’d forgotten, several big somethings, but he had a feeling they were heavy and he was having enough trouble standing as it was. 

This can last. This is fine, this is real, he thought. 

He had always had a knack for lying. That was something all parts of him could agree upon.

 

III

 

There were no mirrors in the house. Nick almost asked why but held his tongue.

 

IV

 

Some days he was more lucid than others; the trouble was telling which was which. One morning it hits him that his wife was dead, recently dead (and he couldn’t remember how it happened but he knew deep in his gut that it had been terrible and he tasted bile at the thought and something else, besides.) He bursts into tears in the middle of Yvonne reading aloud from a book one morning (she liked to do that, to read to Adam and him, liked to play mentor.)

“Sorry,” he blubbers, standing on shaking legs and backing out of the room. His mind reels, spinning in a drunken waltz and there should be someone here to smack this out of him, shouldn’t there? If not a person than something, something to take this feeling away, to tuck it into bed and smother it with a pillow. He doesn’t need this. The worst thing that could possibly happen has already come to pass but  _ what was it? _

Yvonne pats his back with her gloved hands and he leans in closer to her, subconsciously, drawn by the thing pumping in her chest and then he is slammed into the wall and Adam is between him and her.

“None of that,” he says. “Yvonne doesn’t like to be touched.”

“Ok,” Nick says, the tears stopping as abruptly as they began.  _ She has something you don’t. Go ahead and check, see what’s there. _ “I won’t, I wasn’t doing anything, I swear.”

Adam lets him go and suddenly looks uncomfortable. He stares at his shoes, scuffs them along the ground. “What’re you crying for anyway?”

“Something horrible’s happened to Rachel.”

“You remember?”

“No. But it has, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” says Adam.

At the same time Yvonne says, “It was painless, it was quick, she went peacefully, the poor dear.”

“Who set the fire? I knew him, don’t I? I mean, I know him, didn’t I…”

Adam and Yvonne shared a glance. “Don’t try to remember,” Yvonne says, her voice firm and sure, like she’s come to some conclusion. “I know it’s confusing, but can you believe me when I say it’s better not to remember, Nick?”

“I believe you,” he says. And he does. He knows it’s better, this state of of being half-mad and not altogether coherent, than the alternative, and that is why he goes on living there, does not ask tough questions, does not venture outside, does not do anything when hunger pangs immolate him except sit very, very still without even breathing at all.

 

V

 

When Yvonne isn’t home Adam spends a lot of time watching the television since she doesn’t approve of it. Nick sits with him sometimes, mind racing, half comprehending everything he sees, the rest of it like something out of a fever dream and he really, truly thinks he’s lost his mind.

“How old am I?” he asks one day, after coming downstairs to find Adam watching something violent with lots of shouting and gunfire and blood splattering. Adam startles, goes to turn off the telly with the same mortified quickness as if Cutler had walked in on him touching himself. When he sees it’s Nick and not Yvonne he relaxes and leaves the show on.

He looks Cutler in the face, scrutinizing. “Dunno. How old do you feel?”

“Too old.”

“You’ve got one of those faces,” Adam says. “You know, like you could be anywhere from late twenties to early nineties. One of those kind of faces.”

“That’s not...all right, whatever,” Nick says.

“Sit down,” Adam says, patting the sofa. Nick sits. He watches blood splatter across a windshield and something wrenches loose in his chest. His mouth is full of saliva. He sinks lower on the couch, ashamed and wanting what he can’t name, won’t name.

Adam is riveted, gaze fixed on the screen with the intensity of a sinner in church. “Don’t tell Yvonne about this,” he says, voice low and quiet. “It doesn’t mean anything. Really, she makes me better. It’s just that when she goes out for a bit sometimes I like to remember. Reminisce. It doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“Remember what?” Cutler asks, something hot pooling in his gut and it makes him think _ Rachel _ and then he is full of disgust, feels a need to bleach his mind, to wring it out and let the sun scorch it clean for thinking of dear sweet (dead) Rachel like that, for mixing up two kinds of hunger, for—what? What is he thinking? He feels nauseous. He isn’t thinking anything, just like that. It’s that easy, to stop. He was always good at compartmentalizing. “I won’t tell,” he says, and his voice is strung-out, almost cracks.

Adam grunts in acknowledgment. “God, I’m fucking starving,” he says, and his stomach growls. Cutler has his own arms wrapped around his middle as if to hold something in, to keep himself together.

“I feel a bit—I think I’ll go have a lie down,” he says, standing on shaky legs. But he stays and watches the telly for a couple more minutes until with a groan Adam flicks it off and deflates against the back of the sofa, sagging in his seat as though boneless, his face drawn and pained. He closes his eyes, panting. Watching him just makes Nick even more confused and sick so he flees upstairs to the guest bedroom they’ve lent him and sits on the floor clutching a pillow and rocking and wondering how something could have gone so wrong inside him, inside anyone, that these wires got crossed.

He sees blood and feels a surge of love, of adoration. He thinks of his wife and gets hungry. He gets aroused and his stomach starts to growl. He hasn’t dared touch himself. It makes him sick and needy and reminds him that he’s forgotten something and doing that brings it too close. Something is so horridly wrong. All these appetites and he can’t tell them apart, he should be able to, something is so very wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

VI

 

He can hear them through the walls. They aren’t exactly making an effort to be quiet. He’s brushing his teeth in the bathroom and staring intently into the sink, trying to get it done as quickly as possible. Suddenly the door slams open and there’s Adam, shirtless, boxers slung low on his hips, pink scratches down his back. He sees Cutler staring and he smirks and all Cutler can think is,  _ teeth _ , and Adam notices him staring at his canines. It just makes him smirk wider.

“‘Scuse me,” he says, reaching down, and for a second Cutler panics, oh god what is he doing, but Adam is only opening a drawer. He shakes the little bottle at Cutler as he straightens. “Just needed more lube.”

Cutler’s teeth ache. Maybe he’s brushing them too much. There’s a taste he can’t get out of his mouth that keeps him up at night.

Adam is turning to go but Cutler stops him. “Where are all the mirrors?” he asks.

Adam leans against the doorway. “You got burned pretty bad. Don’t want you seeing your own mug and having a heart-attack. Yvonne says it’s better like this for now.”

Cutler touches his face, raises an eyebrow. “I don’t feel burned.”

Adam shrugs, claps him on the back. “Hit your head harder than I thought, didn’t you? You look like a bloody crime scene. Can hardly stand having my sweet lady see you every day. Least I haven’t got any competition to worry about in the looks department, eh?”

Cutler stands there speechless and Adam goes back into his room. He turns back around and finishes brushing his teeth, staring at the wall. There is a rectangle of darker paint where a mirror must have hung, once. He wonders where it is now.

 

VII

 

They give him Rachel’s ashes in an urn and then drive to the sea. It’s the first time he's left the house in a number of weeks he hasn’t bothered to number. Time flows thick and sweet like honey and he laps up all he can get of it.

Yvonne and Adam stand on either side of him, a bit back, as he pours his wife into the sea. He has a ludicrous impulse to wet his fingers and stick them in the ash and taste her. He has a lot of thoughts like that these days. He tries not to make too much of them. He spends a lot of time feeling dizzy and sick of himself.

He knows by now that they are not nurses or therapists or in any way even tangentially related to the health professions. He wonders if he has been kidnapped. If this is some kind of cult initiation. He lies on his back in bed and imagines that he is in a coma, that all of this is in his head and he will wake up to Rachel holding his hand and an IV drip in his arm and everything will be ok.

He wonders if wondering if he’s a schizophrenic precludes himself from the disease. Maybe not that, then. Maybe he’s just depressed. He’s on leave from his life but now he wants a holiday from his holiday, a break from all the nothing. But he doesn’t complain, not yet. The truth is he’s wary of doing anything that might suspend their hospitality. He knows he is a sick man, even if he is not sure what form that sickness takes. The world chewed him up and spit him out on their doorstep and he does not want it to happen again. So far they have been accommodating, have played a fine game. He can play along. He can lie if he needs to, if that’s what it takes.

 

VIII

 

He goes back to work one day like it’s nothing, just comes downstairs in the suit that has been hanging in the closet with the briefcase full of papers he remembers vaguely, like something from a dream. (The room is sparsely furnished with a smattering of belongings they have to tell him are his because he doesn’t know on his own, he can’t act on his own, something or someone has crippled something inside him and he is always waiting for permission now.)

He goes on autopilot and ignores that Adam hangs about the office all day keeping an eye on him. He expects there to be some resistance, to need to provide papers telling them where he’s been. No one asks. Some of them won’t meet his eyes. He gets a knowing smile from his department head. Everything has been taken care of, smoothed over, swept under the rug. 

Adam drove him and along the way kept giving him sideways glances. It was quite a drive so there was plenty of time for them. He’d never seen the boy so pensive. “Won’t be long now,” Adam commented. “Til time’s up. Sure you want to go?”

“Yes. I can’t keep doing nothing forever.”

“You’d be surprised. Really, mate, you don’t have to do this. It’s not—it’ll change things. You might not like what happens next. I don’t think I will.”

“Then why are you letting me go?”

“You’re a grown man. I think people ought to make their own choices, for themselves,” Adam said, with a strange conviction in his voice. Cutler got the feeling he was seeing the result of an argument he hadn’t been part of. Adam’s knuckles clenched on the wheel. “You’ve got to do what you think is best and not let anyone tell you otherwise, right? And if it turns out you made a real cock-up of it all, well, at least it’s your cock-up.”

“Sure,” said Cutler. “Just for the record, I haven’t got any idea of what we’re really talking about here.”

Adam stole a glance at him and shook his head, muttering under his breath. “Lucky fucking you. And you can’t just let it go, let it stay that way. I knew it, who would? Not me. Nobody. People don’t let things be, you know? They pick at scabs like a bunch of bloody masochists.”

“Ok.”

“Don’t look in any mirrors,” Adam said, but he sounded resigned, as though it had already happened. “You really look absolutely horrid.”

Cutler slipped back into his work easily because he was remarkably capable of submerging himself in pure automatic action. He was a bundle of reflexes, reacting to what went on around him and otherwise sitting idle like a wind-up toy.

(There was a misprint on his diploma he tried not to notice but that his eyes kept straying to. Or maybe it wasn’t. What was the year, anyway? He really ought to know. He thought maybe he’d once kept up with that sort of thing, had thought it mattered.)

Adam shouldn’t have worried. He didn’t have any trouble ignoring mirrors. There was nothing to see, anyway.

He didn’t go back. (He took the diploma off the wall and brought it with him; he wasn’t done looking at it, turning it over and over in his mind and looking for the chink where he could dig his heels in and send this whole house of cards tumbling to get to the prize underneath. He didn’t really want it; was sure it was something eyeless and slimy and wriggling. But he thought he ought to have it anyway.)

Adam was relieved when Cutler got into the car at the end of the day and said if it was all right with the two of them, he thought maybe he’d work from home from now on. There was so much could be done online, nowadays, and it was hardly a convenient drive. 

“You feel ok?” Adam asked.

“I feel the same as I usually do.”

“So a few cards short of a full deck then,” said Adam, but he was grinning. They’d told him to tell them about any strange symptoms but Adam was grinning like he’d done something right, and his approval made something go all melty in Cutler’s chest like some knot of tension had untied itself and all was right with the world and he might even make it out alive, might be ok. He thought if he could keep Adam grinning like that, keep them both pleased, maybe he could get away with this, with them, that maybe the worst was really over. So he didn’t tell him how he’d gotten breathless at the sight of the secretary in the lobby’s bare neck, how he imagined he could hear the blood in her jugular and it made him weak in the knees like a teenager on a date and he’d had to lock himself in the bathroom until he’d stopped drooling and was within an inch of a full blown panic-attack. 

The panic was familiar. He hadn’t remembered until now, and it felt like coming home, that horrible feeling of losing balance, of the world coming apart. No one said home had to be a pleasant thing to return to. He would take Yvonne and Adam’s halfway house over home any day.

 

IX

 

That night they went out, the three of them. It was odd and a bit awkward but he was happy, somehow. The sheer relief of reliable company almost swept him off his feet. Sometimes he would come downstairs and find the two of them flirting or cooking or just lounging on the sofa and he’d be almost moved to tears, feel a swell of some kind of longing and contentment and just enough wrongness that made him want to hold onto this, strange as it was, all the more, because he knew he shouldn’t have it. _ One of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong…  _

“Sod off,” he mumbled into his glass of wine. They had walked around the park. Their house was remote, a few miles from town proper, and there were plenty of trees and undeveloped land to wander through. The sky was full of stars; they looked tossed there, abandoned, like ticker-tape after a parade. Ticker-tape. He couldn’t possibly really remember what he was remembering. He told himself he’d never been to any such parade, that he’d hit his head quite hard, and put the thoughts to rest by firing squad.

Now they’re back at the house somehow; he doesn’t know, sometimes time gets away from him when he blinks and misses it wave as it goes by. But he’s at the table and they’re all having a modest amount of wine. Yvonne poured.

“Hey, language,” said Adam, covering Yvonne’s ears. She giggled. She was tipsy, but only just. She had that thing called class that Cutler had never quite managed to obtain but never got tired of striving for.

“Sorry,” he said, and downed his drink. He was drinking faster than was classy, that was for sure, but that didn’t surprise him, that was nothing new. A thought struck him like a brick to the chest and it settled in his bones and felt like it fit. He thought, I think I am or was an alcoholic. “Do I have an alcohol problem?” _ Might be, might have been, it’s going, going, gone, see it go, watch it fly, it’s all bad news anyway just let it go. _

“Oh,” said Yvonne, fluttering her hands, her eyes going wide. She looked like she wanted her papers. He’d seen her shuffle through them from time to time when he did something that bothered her like ask about the gambler or talked to himself or zoned out for whole minutes at a time while she was talking to him or mentioned the war. “I don’t think so. I don’t believe so. That was never—never mentioned. It would have been mentioned. Dear, I mean, wouldn’t you remember that?”

“Sure,” said Cutler, and poured himself another glass.

“Don’t worry Yvonne,” Adam said. “He’s all right. We’re here.”

“Yes,” Yvonne said, nodding. “The important thing is what we’re doing now. What makes you ask, Nick?”

Nick shrugged. It was white wine. He’d never liked wine much, but especially not white. He thought maybe he’d been a gin kind of person. He opened his mouth to reply and then saw the look in Adam’s eyes. He was watching closely. This response was to be graded. Nick knew how it worked by now. He wanted them to laugh and give him another pass. “Nothing, no reason. Just remembered an argument Rachel and I had, once. Just a one-off thing, I think. I think we sorted it all out just fine in the end.”

“That’s good,” said Yvonne.

Adam nodded. He was staring at his glass.

 

X

 

Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night trembling and thought he might have been having an affair. That didn’t seem like him; he loved Rachel, he was sure he had. Did. 

The timeline was all mixed up. There simply wasn’t enough life to fit all these phantom memories and sensations into. When would he have had time for a lover? Let alone a lover who bit and did the things his body remembered but that his mind couldn't quite get a grip on.

(Sometimes he wondered why he thought it might have been a lover. It might just as easily have been a torturer, if his faulty memory was to be trusted. He shook at the pain that ghosted across his body on those nights he woke having dreamt about it. He couldn’t remember the other person, not clearly, had no idea of their intention. All he had to go off of was the empty ache in his chest he was left with when he woke.)

Here was the question his life had been reduced to, in all its mean little sickness, the question that he and Rachel were all wrapped up in, the question that took the shape of this pseudo-lover: Was he in love or was he just hungry?

 

XI

 

Sometimes this great guilt crashes into him and disembowels him. 

He drops his empty plate as he carries it to the sink and it shatters and he feels like there is a very real possibility he is going to be sick right here on the kitchen floor with the sheer force of this shame that has come out of nowhere and hijacked his body.

Adam is at his side in a second, tugging him back a few steps from the shards like they’re liable to reach out and bite. “What’s the matter with you?” he grumbled. “Plates don’t just grow on trees, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Nick stammers. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know.”

“Take him upstairs, would you?” Adam asked Yvonne. “I don’t want those pretty hands of yours getting cut. I’ll clean it up.”

She took him to his room and sat on the bed with him while he got his breathing under control. She stroked his hair with her gloved hand and he felt mothered for the first time in he didn’t know how long and that made it all worse and then better.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again.

“It’s all right, dear, it was just a plate, not matter what that Adam says.”

“Yvonne,” he said, and here he goes, breaking his own promises to himself, pushing them away. “I think I may have done a bad thing. I don’t know what it was, just sometimes I—sometimes I’m just sure I’ve done something terrible.”

Yvonne is quiet for a while and he curses himself, sure he’s finally gone and done it, gotten himself kicked out into the cold and god knows where he’ll go next. The world is alien and frightening and painfully familiar when it really shouldn’t be.

“We’ve all done things we shouldn’t have,” Yvonne says. “Some worse than others, that’s true. But it’s making mistakes and then trying to be better that makes us human, makes us good. And...and you are trying, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he whispers, going for a pitiful, tremulous tone. “I’m trying very hard.”  _ I can’t try to be better than what I can’t remember,  _ he thinks, but doesn’t say, because now he’s in control of his own voice enough to know better. _ I can’t be better than I was before if I don’t remember who I was, don’t you see? Forgetting the bad, hiding, that’s not doing better. You can’t be good by default. And what’s so admirable about trying to be human anyway? That’s a piss-poor baseline if I’ve ever heard one. _

“Then you’re going to be just fine,” she says, petting his hair again. “I suppose you can’t really know what you have, but you are a very lucky man. Can you believe that? Do you think you can try and believe that—that sometimes it’s a gift, what you have? To not remember? I know this isn’t a glamorous life, and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes I...envy you your innocence.”

He doesn’t know how to feel about that. Flattery hasn’t failed him yet, though, and in this case it comes easily. “I think you’re wonderful,” he says.

Yvonne looks a little teary-eyed and he hasn’t the faintest idea why but figures he’s still safe, for now. “You’re very kind,” she whispers, staring at her own hand on his head, the soft glove she only takes off to touch Adam. “You’re a kind, funny little man, aren’t you?”

Now that’s a bit patronizing but he thinks she’s seeing exactly what she wants to see in him right now so he lets it go, gladly. He is safe for another night. So long as he keeps himself vulnerable and weak enough to maintain their pity, he is safe.

That night he can’t stop thinking about the shards of plate on the floor and how Adam worried about her cutting her hands. Nick wonders what might have happened if she had. He doesn’t know. The answer should be easy: nothing. He doesn’t know much but he knows it wouldn’t have been that.

 

XII

 

Sometimes he almost forgets that something really is off in his head, forgets that he isn’t really acting all that much when he plays on their sympathies. He really does need this. He is sick.

He is in the garage putting in a load of laundry when he turns and there is Rachel standing in the open doorway, staring. She is in a nightgown.  _ The  _ nightgown, his mind supplies, nudging him towards the cliff and again he resists, plants his feet firmly on the ground and refuses to fall.

“If I’d known how much you enjoy being a kept man I might have done some things differently,” she says.

Nick likes to imagine that he is an eloquent, articulate man. He manages to really believe it between the intervals wherein he’s reminded what an utter tongue-tied buffoon he can be with his sloppy voice and penchant for blurting such absolute gems as: “What?”

“You like to be needed, I knew that much,” she said. Her face was indistinct. That should’ve been his clue that this wasn’t real, the fact that she was like something half-erased, blurred by his inability to properly recall her appearance. “But the way you let them take care of you now, how much you want people taking pride in you...I’m not sure I ever saw how strong a hold that had over you. I see it now. First with the gambler, and now these two. But especially him. You tried to chose me, but in the end... ”

“What about the gambler? Who was he? How are you here, Rachel, god, what happened to you?”

“You already know.”

“I...I think I did something,” Nick said, not daring to step closer to her. His throat felt tight and scratchy. “Rachel, please, tell me I didn’t hurt you.”

“I think you really loved me, Nick. I really believe we were in love.”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t all go wrong!” he shouted, finally unsticking his feet and taking a faltering step toward her. “That doesn’t mean you were safe.”

She opened her mouth and somewhere a laugh track played and it was horrible. “What a clever little man you are,” she said, and then Yvonne was coming through the door and she was gone and Adam was right behind her with his dark, watchful gaze that pinned Nick like a man on trial.

“Nick? What’s the matter?” Yvonne asked.

“I saw Rachel,” he admits. “She was here, right there, she was talking to me.”

“You saw your dead wife?” Adam asks, gaze sharpening. He looked around the garage as though she might be hiding behind the radiator.

“Yes, yes,” said Nick, something between a sob and a laugh getting lodged in his throat.

“Adam, don’t be insensitive,” Yvonne says, taking Cutler by the arm and steering him out of the garage.

“He can’t be seeing ghosts, Yvonne, that’s no good,” Adam mutters, taking one last look around the garage before shutting the door.

“It wasn’t a ghost,” Yvonne said with a pointed look at Adam. “You’re just very stressed, dear, and still mourning her. It’s perfectly common for people grieving lost loved ones to imagine them, hear their voices. I know it must have been distressing, but it’s nothing to worry about. Sit down, I’ll make tea,” she said, pushing him into a seat before going to the kitchen and busying herself with the kettle.

“What did Rachel say?” Adam asks, quietly.

Nick stares at his hands on the table, shocked enough not to listen to what he’s saying as he gibbers. “She called me a kept man. What’ve I done? I think I’ve had an affair. What would I go and do that for? Why would I do that to her? I loved her, she knew it, she said we were in love, I—I would never do that to her, but I remember, there was more, it wasn’t just her, I wanted—there were these other things going on.”

There are three hazy visions of people in his head and the more he thinks the closer they slide, the more they overlap, and he wants to keep them neat and separate but he doesn’t seem to have a say in this. (He’s never had a say in this, not this.)

“What things? What’re you talking about, slow down,” Adam hissed.

There’s the gambler, there’s this person he had what he’s dubbed an “affair” with, the one he adored and idolized and coveted the attention and approval of, and then there’s this person who bit and hurt him and got excited by the sight of blood and suddenly it’s all one man, one faceless, nameless man who’s somehow familiar nonetheless by his appetite alone. Nick knows the shape of his hunger and remembers thinking that this was the most intimate way of knowing someone, cradling this hunger between them. They were the same.  _ He made us the same. _

He feels sick. He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want this to be true, to be in his head, to have happened at any point in time, no matter how long ago. But it’s on him like a stain, like a brand, and he can’t wash it off. 

“It’s nothing,” he says, putting his hands in his lap so Adam won’t see his fists clenching. “Like Yvonne said, I—I’m still very upset, about Rachel. About her passing. I just need to, to calm down.”

But Adam’s eyes are so dark and wary and Nick misses the times when they’d been half-lidded and lazy. Where is sleepy-eyed Adam who lounges about like a cat in the sun with a bellyful of cream, saying things about Yvonne that made Cutler blush as though they were perfectly natural comments? What is he so afraid of?

Cutler doesn’t know what it is, only that it’s the same thing he’s afraid of, all the time.

 

XII

 

Yvonne likes to light candles at night and read to them from the classics; poetry especially. Cutler remembers being read to. He doesn’t think he liked it then. It had been a thin veneer of care on top of a threat then, and the second he let himself be lulled into dopey contentment it was snatched away and he was bleeding and bruised and had done something unspeakable. Now it was nice.

Now Adam had built a fort out of sheets and chairs and pillows and was huddled in there listening to Yvonne and pretending this was some kind of caravan scenario wherein he was a poor son of a cobbler who’d run away from his lowly station and stumbled into the waiting arms of this wise and worldly traveling trader of goods and services.

Cutler tried not to think too much about what it was all a precursor to and just laid on his back in the fort watching the warm glow from the candles dance across the sheets with Adam beside him on his stomach flipping through a comic book since Yvonne couldn’t see him.

Sometimes he thought whatever was wrong with him Adam might have a touch of, too. He had been thinking this for a while now. Since the incident with the telly, really.

Sometimes Adam was such a child, acted so much how he looked, and others suddenly he was all too old. He was displaced.

There were other things, too. Things Cutler keeps to himself.

He lies in the fort with his hands laced on his chest, close to the posture of a corpse in a casket but not quite, and feels for his missing heartbeat. He’d done this before, late at night; now it is almost subconscious. Adam catches him pressing at his chest and raises a brow. He looks a tad too knowing for Cutler’s liking. Cutler is used to not having things to his liking so this is not such a big deal.

“Whatcha doing?” Adam whispers. Neither of them want Yvonne to stop reading and scold them.

“Nothing,” Cutler says.

“You’ve been doing a lot of nothing lately. It bothers me.”  
“Sometimes I think I can’t feel my heart, is all,” Nick says. The charade is wearing thin. He’s hanging onto the cliff edge by his fingertips but holding on nonetheless. If it were a matter of willpower he thinks he could hold on a very long time; the problem is he’s getting tired of the game when he knows his strength will give eventually. He’s getting a bit bored, to tell the truth. He wants to shake things up. He would have done it by now except for the lingering worry that if he shakes them too much he’ll find himself buried when it all settles.

(He knows that Adam doesn’t have a heartbeat either. He knows this because he can hear Yvonne’s and the few other people he’s come into contact with. He doesn’t know if this is another thing that happens when you hit your head a bit too hard, another hallucination, or something else, something like the hunger that sometimes wakes him and has him shivering and whimpering and putting his own wrist in his mouth but not daring to bite, just driving himself mad.)

“Does that bother you?” Adam asks.

Cutler takes a moment to think. “No,” he says. “It used to, a bit. Now I don’t think much of it at all. It is what it is.”

(There is a callous part of him that is hardened and warped and hardly feels at all, just claws and claws its way to the top of all his other temperaments, determined to survive. His heart is calcified. It is a fossil inside his chest that is a museum full of awful, second-rate broken things that belong in a yard sale.)

“Good,” says Adam. “It’s good not to think too much about shit we can’t do anything about. I’ve got better things to think about like how hot and bothered all this reading gets Yvonne, if you know what I’m saying.”

“I know what you’re saying. You’re perfectly clear every time you say something like that, Adam, there’s really nothing not to get.”

Adam snickers.

“Are you boys quite finished or do I need to read all that again?” Yvonne said.

“Which one’ll be good for you?” Adam asks.

Nick rolls his eyes. Sometimes he imagines he can feel his pulse. Sometimes he almost believes he can. He thinks he used to. He dreams about it.

 

XIII

 

Yvonne is on the phone downstairs and Adam is off in another room so Nick creeps out onto the staircase and listens. He’s agitated. Something is changing; this is new, this is different, this is a clue and he isn’t sure if he wants it or not.

“He’s doing very well,” she’s saying, she’s twirling a loose thread around her fingers. “We’ve had no incidents. No, no, nothing like that, nothing at all.”

It’s a man on the line. Nick can’t tell any more than that.

“No, not even when Adam took him into town for work, he—what? Yes, he did, Hal, he did. Adam asked you about this, don’t you remember? He said you—oh, no. Oh no, that boy is in for a world of trouble now. He didn’t ask you? He just did it on his own?”

The man is upset. He’s a man and now he’s upset and all this clue has done so far is make him feel like the child of parents with joint-custody who can’t agree.

“Well, be that as it may, nothing happened, and afterwards he never asked to go again. He’s been fine. He stays in, he’s very manageable, dare I say obedient. Yes. He spends a lot of time with Adam and I, helps around the house, all very mundane things. He spends a lot of time online, I suppose, but we can hardly monitor everything, Hal, for goodness sake—the point of this was to give him some kind of life, not a prison sentence. I know you think you know what’s best, and you know more about this than me, but what is the point if we keep him locked up in a room all day? That’s safe, true, but at that point so is, well, being dead! There, I said it. You asked for our help and if you do not approve of how we give it then you are free to handle this yourself but this is the manner I am comfortable with.”

_ Hal, Hal, Hal. _ He knew a Hal once, he knows Hal. He knows he knew him. That’s as certain as he can be.

He hurries back into his room and shuts the door but he can’t get away, there is blood rushing in his ears but it’s not his own.  _ It can’t be his because he is dead and he knows he is dead and thinks maybe he has known it for a long, long time and does it matter anyway, if this is being dead? If being dead is walks in the park and pillow forts and not having dinner alone? Perhaps death has degrees. He hasn’t scraped its bottom yet. _

He takes his certificate out from under his bed where he’s hidden it and stares for a long time at the date,  _ 1947 _ , and knows it’s not the date that’s wrong, but him; he is the misprint, the thing that  _ does not belong. _

He isn’t burnt but he has been burned and he is anywhere from his late twenties to his early nineties and he remembers air raid sirens and flat-screen televisions and there is something wrong wrong wrong with his heart and with the way that love and lust and hunger are all twisted up inside him and he doesn’t know if he was always this way or if he will always be this way but he is right now and he can’t think his way out of it. He drifts out of his body and loses track of time and then Adam is slipping the certificate from his hands and crouching down beside him, something clutched in his hand, held behind his back.

“How much do you know?” Adam asks.

Cutler shakes his head. “There’s a man called Hal on the phone and I think that sounds familiar. I think I’m older than I should be. I don’t want to know any more.”

“I don’t want you to either,” Adam says. “So I’m going to take this and let’s not look at it or think about it again, ok?” he says, looking at the certificate.

Cutler nods. Adam leaves but not before he sees it’s a wooden stake he’s holding behind his back.

That’s another thing he won’t think about.

(But there’s this giant hole in his chest, right beneath and just to the left of his dead shriveled heart and he thinks  _ someone missed their mark _ and then  _ I sort of wish they hadn’t _ .)

 

XIV

 

They make a big to-do about Adam’s birthday and it’s only then that Cutler realizes the boy hasn’t got any friends. He catches himself thinking the boy ought to be hanging out with people his own age. Then he looks at the cake Yvonne baked with a big pink candle in the shape of the number 16 and remembers to stop remembering because that just can’t be right.

Later he pulls him aside and asks, “How old are you really?”

Adam blinks and stares as though trying to determine if this is one of the things he can’t say for fear of sending Cutler over the edge into whatever is waiting. “Forty-nine.”

Cutler nods, pretends he doesn’t feel light-headed. He needs to seize this opportunity to ask what he’s been wondering in a way that doesn’t seem to be ringing any alarm bells in Adam’s head. “Are you older than me?”

“No. Look, Nick. Don’t think about it. Just know that—that what you’ve got, I’ve got it, too. And we’ve both gotta stay just like this, so don’t think about it. Please. I like what we’ve got here. I’ll never meet another woman like Yvonne, understand? And you’re not a complete wanker yourself, so just let it stay nice like it is right now.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have anything for you for your birthday. You can have money if you want. I can’t remember but I’ve got a feeling I’ve got lots of it.”

“I want you to shut up and eat my hot wife’s cake,” Adam says, and then they’re kissing on the table top. Cutler eats his cake. Double-chocolate and covered in rainbow sprinkles. Sixteen indeed.

  
  


XV

 

He wakes up one day and realizes he somehow loves them and this is more of a mystery than the year on the certificate or the number on Adam’s cake or the man on the phone all rolled into one. It terrifies him. He bolts downstairs to find Yvonne making tea and Adam asleep at the bar with his cheek squished against the countertop, drooling.

“Oh, dear, what’s gotten into you?” Yvonne asks.

_ I genuinely care about you and that’s ten kinds of wrong and the fact that you seem to care about me too is so good it’s intoxicating and because I’m getting used to having this I was sure I’d come down here and find you both murdered. _

“Don’t you know I’m a morning person?” he said.

Yvonne chuckles. “There’s a little cafe Adam and I were thinking of trying…”

“Go ahead,” Cutler asks. He’s dense but not to the point he can’t take a hint. They’ve hardly had a moment to go out by themselves since he came here. Not that he made them give that up. It was just one of many unspoken things.

“You’ll be all right?” she asked. 

He nodded. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

She smiled. She trusted him. It felt like a punch in the gut. He had to excuse himself so she wouldn’t see that he was stuck between laughing at her for reasons he couldn’t fully understand and having a panic attack.

When they return he is on the sofa with the news on, checking on his stocks. Apparently he owns stocks. Tension visibly leaves their shoulders. They sigh in relief and join him. Adam changes the channel to some show where men do ridiculous, humiliating things for dares.

He still misses Rachel. He still misses the man from his nightmares sometimes, too. 

Mostly though, he watches game shows and goes for long walks and helps Yvonne cook (he’s always been a horrendous cook and she’s looking to fix that just like she is with his taste in literature and knowledge of Latin prefixes) and goes swimming with Adam.

It won’t last, he thinks. Nothing does, he thinks.


End file.
